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You’ll need to wait till next year to get your fresh meat. Sunday night was The Walking Dead’s mid-season finale — the cult phenom scarefest is on hiatus until Feb. 10.

At which point they’re going to have some ‘splaining to do.

The eventful episode started with a look at a new group, led by a man named Tyreese (Chad Coleman), who readers of the Dead comic book will know as a major character who will be sticking around for a while. Unlike a female member of his party, who gets herself bit before the first commercial.

Beset by a walker attack, they spot and make a beeline for our friends’ home base, the prison.

Meanwhile, in “idyllic” Woodbury, Andrea and the Governor are still hot and heavy. And the Governor is still nuts, with his fish tanks full of severed heads and his zombie daughter in a closet.

Glenn and Maggie are recovering from their brutal interrogations; Maggie reassures Glenn she was not actually raped. Glenn rips off and strips down an arm from a dead (as in dead dead) walker, and fashions the bone into a weapon. Rick and our gang, on their rescue mission, breach the Woodbury walls and encounter and kill a local. Michonne goes off on her own.

Back at the prison, Axel is warming up to Beth, until Carol intervenes. Axel has always assumed Carol was a lesbian because of her short hair. Yeah, I know. Carol laughed too.

In Woodbury, things are coming to a head as Glenn, sentenced to “the Screaming Pits,” goes all medieval on Merle and his captors. Merle wins, but Rick and the others are only seconds away.

The Governor is trying to keep Andrea busy so she won’t recognize her former friends. She isn’t really buying it. Michonne is now in the Governor’s house.

Rick et al make their move and grab Glenn and Maggie, then make for the wall, with Daryl staying behind to provide cover. Not so much for Oscar, who is shot and killed.

Rick thinks he sees Shane in the confusion. He doesn’t. Shane is dead, as in dead dead, and is actually off making a movie, which is why the apparition appears with a beard. Clearly Rick is not yet playing with a full deck.

Back at the prison, Carl is manning up and following the sound of screams down to the boiler room. There he finds Tyreese’s group and extends them prison hospitality, but only behind locked doors. He offers to off their bitten friend, but Tyreese insists on handling it himself.

In Woodbury, Michonne makes the grisly discovery of the Governor’s head collection and his daughter in the closet. The Governor comes home in time to see this, and despite his pleas to the contrary, Michonne skewers the zombie child through the neck with her sword. The Governor goes ballistic, and Michonne stabs him in the eye with a piece of his smashed head aquarium.

Andrea enters and tries to take all this in. Needless to say, doubts are beginning to surface. Michonne runs off to rejoin the others.

The Governor recovers sufficiently to stir up the townsfolk over the exaggerated “terrorist” threat. He offers up Merle as their inside man, probably as payback for lying about killing Michonne. And then Merle finds himself face to face with his long-lost brother, Daryl. It looks like they are being set up for a fight to the death.

But we won’t know until February.

This show just gets better week by week, as the characters deepen and the jeopardy mounts. By this point, you would expect things to slow down and stagnate. But they have almost a decade of comic book continuity to draw from — for example, Tyreese — as well as plot lines and characters of their own invention, such as Daryl and Merle.

You can watch the story develop all over again from the beginning when AMC mounts a The Walking Dead marathon New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

And something else to look forward to when the show returns in February: the accompanying, and essential, live after-show, Talking Dead, will move to immediately follow each episode, and will run an hour, instead of the hurried half. That’s twice as much insider dish and celebrity-fan gush every week.

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